Idiotprogrammer Blog

Category: World Affairs

  • Facades of Albania Pallati’s

    Some of you might already know, but I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Albania. I’ve actually written a lot of essays and taken a lot of photos, but haven’t had the chance to post them in a while. One of the Peace Corps people took some stunning photographs of front facades of Albania in highrises. Albania is in many ways an ugly place, but even with that, the architecture and the odd juxtapositions are striking. Such is the case with the pyramid in downtown Tirana, designed by the dictator’s daughter. It is awfully impractical, idiotically designed, but one of the oddest most enjoyable places I’d ever visited. There are lots of places to sit down outside, and children regularly climb to the top of the building to slide down from. You have to see to believe.

    Albanian pallati scene Albanian pallati2 pallati 3 pallati 4

  • Ton of Bricks

    Added Jim Roepcke’s Have Browser Will Travel to my permanent links. He gave a good intro to python at a plone conference. (The other slides/presentations are archived here).

    Roepcke alerted me to the amazing interview with soldier Jim Massey about his participation in the killing of innocent Iraqi civilians. There are chilling quotes everywhere:

    Q: What does the public need to know about your experiences as a Marine?

    A: The cause of the Iraqi revolt against the American occupation. What they need to know is we killed a lot of innocent people. I think at first the Iraqis had the understanding that casualties are a part of war. But over the course of time, the occupation hurt the Iraqis. And I didn’t see any humanitarian support.

    Q: What experiences turned you against the war and made you leave the Marines?

    A: I was in charge of a platoon that consists of machine gunners and missile men. Our job was to go into certain areas of the towns and secure the roadways. There was this one particular incident – and there’s many more – the one that really pushed me over the edge. It involved a car with Iraqi civilians. From all the intelligence reports we were getting, the cars were loaded down with suicide bombs or material. That’s the rhetoric we received from intelligence. They came upon our checkpoint. We fired some warning shots. They didn’t slow down. So we lit them up.

    Q: Lit up? You mean you fired machine guns?

    A: Right. Every car that we lit up we were expecting ammunition to go off. But we never heard any. Well, this particular vehicle we didn’t destroy completely, and one gentleman looked up at me and said: “Why did you kill my brother? We didn’t do anything wrong.” That hit me like a ton of bricks.

  • Illegal Tomatoes

    Virginia Postrel post about yummy tomatoes, and Tim Worstall wrote about how EU trade rules are keeping out “illegal tomatoes”.

    This actually reminds me of the strange restaurant menus I encountered in Eastern Europe. Instead of menus being marketing tools, menus often contained simply the number of grams each dish contained and the Trade Minister’s stamp of approval. This is one sign of how a “permission culture” ends up stifling innovation.

  • US Deports Muslims

    I’m reading a longish article by Michelle Goldberg on salon.com (subscription required) about Muslim families who were expelled from USA after September 11, and came across this whopper:

    In November 2002, the Justice Department instituted the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, or special registration, which required men from most Arab or Muslim countries to report to immigration officials to be fingerprinted, photographed and interviewed. Of the 85,000 men who came forward to register, more than 13,000 were either deported or put into deportation proceedings. In December 2003, the administration suspended much of the program, but no relief was given to those it had already ensnared.

    So 1/6 of the law-abiding immigrants who registered according to some crazy law had deportation proceedings filed against them. Another reason to be embarrassed about being an American.

  • The Asimov/Al Queda Connection

    Giles Foden of the Guardian details informed speculation about how Bin Laden might have been influenced by Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, or whether the name Al-Queda might have been a direct translation of the word Foundation. Details the relationship between sci fi novels and terrorist groups with respect to a Japanese doomsday cult, Aum:

    In 1995, after the subway attacks, a coded letter arrived at the magazine Takarajima 30. Believed to have been from Aum sympathisers, it gives a sense of how seriously the sect’s members took Asimov and science fiction more generally. The letter, which promised an attack on the Tokaimura nuclear reprocessing plant, embedded its threat in a passage of literary criticism.

    Shimatsu explains: “The letter was a rebuttal to an essay by Susan Sontag in which she claims the sci-fi film genre is based on a fascination with catastrophe in the age of the bomb. Instead, this critic asserted, science fiction is really about surviving catastrophe, and is therefore optimistic – and the key to the genre is the longing for a sense of scientific community resembling the craft guilds of the past.

    “A professor of American literature at one of Tokyo’s top universities, a specialist in science fiction, immediately recognised the passage as the work of literary critic Frederic Jameson. It was obviously selected as a defense of the Aum sect’s effort to build a community of scientists modelled after Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.”

  • Tracking Down a Girl in a Photo

    How 20 years later a photographer tracked down an Afghani girl who appeared on the cover of National Geographic.

  • John Edwards for President

    Today I donated $25 to the John Edwards for President campaign (after donating $20 to moveon.org, $10 of which was matched by George Soros). John Edwards has always impressed me. He’s not as much of a populist as Howard Dean, and he has a better political knack. He believes in helping the middle class, but he’s relatively free trade. Also, I tend to think that the Bubbas of the world won’t find Howard Dean very appealing, whereas they might glom onto Wesley Clark or John Edwards. On another note: imagine if Al Gore had selected John Edwards for his vice-presidential pick in 2000. It might have helped him pick up another southern state (perhaps even Gore’s home state).

  • Iranian Bloggers

    According to a Mark Glaser interview with imprisoned Iranian blogger Sina Motallebi , Iranian president recently bragged about the number of Persian weblogs, and Iran’s vice-president has a weblog .

    In the meantime, I see that my own weblog is more than 2 years old, and that my youngish share the music weblog is 5 months old. The funny thing is that after June 2002, I pretty much don’t spend much time on my weblog. I just use it to jot down random thoughts about articles I’d read. (My share the music weblog was far more ambitious, and so was my dormant Asiafirst weblog (which I actually took great pains to write well for). Also, I manage two other weblogs on the side, and you see why I need a more robust content management system than what WordPress or Blogger can offer.